Obviously, most social networks have some sort of engagement button for liking/up voting/promoting a piece of content. As well as helping users feel like they’re participating, rather than just passively consuming, most networks also use the likes/ups to filter or promote content to other users.

As a dumb noob, what does the up/down vote do in lemmy in particular? Does it actually affect anything beyond changing the number beside the little arrows? I know there’s some discussion about lemmy tracking ‘karma’ even if it’s not visible in all clients. Can different instances implement “karma thresholds”? Or auto hide posts that fall beneath a certain down vote ratio?

And more subjectively, what do you feel up/down voting represents? Is it showing agreement with the post? That you want to see more posts like that? That other people should look at the post? Does it matter if this subjective purpose is actually unrelated to what the up votes do in reality?

  • Rentlar
    69·
    1 year ago

    I had almost 40k comment karma and a couple hundred post karma on Reddit…

    It never mattered to me.

    My policy is this:

    • Agree/Like/Interested = upvote
    • Disagree/Not interested = no vote
    • Stupid/Off-topic/Troll/Bait = downvote.
    • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works
      181·
      1 year ago

      My policy is: Relevant to conversation = upvote.

      Not Relevant or misinformation = downvote.

      I upvote plenty of stuff that I disagree with because I think it will further engagement about an important topic.

    • Ricaz@lemmy.world
      143·
      1 year ago

      This was how reddit was meant to be. Now every opinion the hive mind disagrees with gets downvoted to hell.

    • Wolf Link 🐺@lemmy.world
      5·
      1 year ago

      My way:

      • Upvote: neutral / friendly contributions related to the topic, regardless of whether or not I personally agree (Exception; hate speech wrapped in nice words. I don’t care how “friendly” the sentence seems, if the message itself is hate speech of any kind then downvote and/or report)

      • Nothing: Contributions that are friendly but off-topic, accidental duplicate posts, and stuff I don’t understand.

      • Downvote: Spam, scams, troll posts and hate speech of any kind.

      I never downvote people just because I disagree. On the contrary - different opinions but discussed in a civilized manner, that’s an upvote from me.